You Give Me Fever

You give me fever
Fever when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever
In the morning
Fever all through the night
-Eddie Cooley and John Davenport

10 p.m., Monday, October 22. The Van Dammt residence.

Dirk spoke with his mother following the funeral for his father, Fritz. He was admonished for making the reading of the will but not the funeral itself. Unfortunately for Dirk, there was no money left in the family’s coffers. Kitty told him that even Dirk’s friend Ollie was able to make the funeral, and he flew out from England for it.

The family butler presented Dirk with a bouquet accompanied by a note of condolences with a strange but familiar symbol on it. The note read, “Have a message from your father, come visit me.” Dirk deduced that the note came from Julia Lansdale, and made a note to check in on her when he’d finished other tasks.

A servant walked into the room and announced that Dirk had a call waiting for him from a Norma. He took her call in the sitting room and she confided that her son Johnny had taken ill very suddenly after a short stay at the hospital, and the family doctor had been unable to determine the cause. Dirk offered to use his connections to get his family doctor to make a house call. He asked Norma to round up their coterie and meet at her residence later that evening.

12 a.m., Tuesday, October 23. Norma’s residence.

Norma and Dirk were met by Joseph Dante, Simon Masterson, Olga Scholl, and Jasper in Norma’s foyer. Her sister Maude demanded to know what all these people were doing in her house and Norma countered that they owned the house together and she was free to have guests if she wanted to. Maude stormed off and the group visited Johnny’s room. Johnny’s condition had been steadily worsening and Dirk offered to call the doctor that had treated his father to make a house call. A couple hours later Dr. Muller arrived.

Olga instantly recognized Dr. Muller as Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a Nazi who brought a soldier she had killed back to life. She confronted the doctor and, after pressing him extensively and inadvertently revealing her vampiric nature, got him to confess that he had mastered a form a reanimation. Olga would have killed him right there, but Norma stayed her hand and asked the doctor to check on Johnny. He concluded that Johnny was suffering from what appeared to be typhoid fever, but an advanced form of it, and that there had been several other patients at hospitals throughout the New York City area that had recently come down with similar symptoms. Most of the illnesses coincided with the arrival of a new nurse, Emily Malloy. Dr. Strughold wanted to see the issue resolved, and so subtly indicated that while he couldn’t divulge her personnel records, all those records are kept in the records department on the second floor of the hospital he worked in.

The coterie traveled to the hospital and, while Jasper caused a diversion at the front desk, Simon and Olga snuck into the personnel records room. They quickly looked up Emily Molloy’s personnel file and found a listing for an apartment in the Bronx. Olga took an extra minute to check on Dr. "Muller"’s records, and found a note had been slipped into his records. Opening it up, she found a sketch of a white rose and a warning to the doctor that he was being watched. Having the information they needed and with daylight quickly approaching, the group split off to sleep the day in their respective havens, and agreed to meet up the following evening near Emily Molloy’s residence.

10 p.m., Tuesday, Oct 23. St. Raymond’s Cemetery.

That evening, the group made it to the address listed in the personnel file and discovered that it was a listing for a graveyard. They hopped the fence and looked for the “room” number on the file, eventually finding Division 15, Row 19, Grave 55, the tombstone of Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary. The grave site was sunken in. They visited the groundskeeper’s shack and found it surprisingly easy to convince the keeper to dig up the grave. It was empty. Dirk wanted to check in and see what message Julia Lansdale had from his father before the group did anything rash.

The group traveled to Julia’s shop in Italian Harlem. They arrived as one of her clients left, cautiously covering his neck to hide the bite marks. She welcomed them in, very excited to make contact with the spirit world. She drew out a Ouija board and called out for Fritz Van Dammt’s spirit to communicate with them. The board responded quickly and confirmed that the nurse infected Fritz. It also put the last piece in the puzzle by showing that she could be found in the hospital she was first quarantined at, on the now-abandoned North Brother Island. Finally, Fritz’s spirit revealed that the infection could be fought off, but only through enchanted blood, for example the blood of a fae. Dirk recalled that Ollie and he had seen Will o’ the Wisps in their youth, and convinced the group to pay him a visit before traveling to the island itself.

Arriving at Ollie’s hotel, Dirk announced himself to the desk attendant who called up to Ollie’s room. Ollie requested they come straight up to the room rather than meet in the lobby. He came across as extremely paranoid, demanding to know everyone’s name while looking through the peephole, and very carefully unlocking the chain before allowing them in. He explained that he had been abducted all those years ago and wanted to make contact with Dirk because he was convinced Dirk may be able to hide him from the aliens. Dirk promised to do what he could but explained the situation they faced with Johnny. Ollie, being the highly suggestible type, agreed to offer them a sample of their blood to take back to the hospital.

4 a.m., Wednesday, Oct 25. New York Presbyterian Hospital.

After making a call to Maude to have Johnny brought back to NYPH, the group traveled there. They arranged for a doctor who wasn’t a secret Nazi to take a sample of Ollie’s blood and test it. The doctor returned shortly after with good news and weird news. The good news was that Ollie’s blood was Type O, a universal donor. Strangely, it also seemed to have a cellulose structure more characteristic of plants than animals. Still, Norma consented to have Johnny receive a blood transfusion from Ollie and the child’s fever broke almost instantly. The doctor explained that he may be able to engineer a cure for everyone infected if he took a bone marrow sample from Ollie, but it would be an invasive procedure and could kill him. The group agreed to table that recommendation while they made a quick detour the next night to make sure Mary Mallon didn’t infect anyone else.

10 p.m., Wednesday, Oct 25. North Brother Island

Stealing a small boat on the east side of Manhattan, the group rowed out to North Brother Island. They approached the west side of the hospital and were set upon by hell hounds. The hounds struck Olga and Simon, taking them down to the ground before the rest of the coterie were able to kill them with shot gun blasts. Olga and Simon drained the dead hounds blood and channeled their vitae through their body to recover from their wounds and the group walked up to the main doors.

Dante side-stepped just in time to avoid getting hit in the face with a pool of blood thrown from the roof. Everyone looked to the rooftops to try and see their assailant, but whoever had thrown the blood had already disappeared. They made their way into the hospital and saw a message scrawled in blood listing the first law of the Kindred banning siring without permission. A small crawl space granted access to the stairwell, and Norma crawled through it to get into the next room. Her hand planted in something wet, in the light she saw it was a small pool of blood. On the wall was written in blood the second tradition: never to break the Masquerade.

The group continued on and on the second floor made their way to a doorway. When they opened it, they were attacked by a swarm of bats, one of which rammed Norma, slapping blood on her again. Everyone opened fire and the bats scattered quickly. They scrambled into the room where rubble and debris made a hill to the collapsed garden top roof above. They climbed up and were assaulted by Mary Mallon herself.

She threw what appeared to be a water balloon and hit Dante squarely in the face. Before the group could react, her eyes turned red and Norma, Simon, Olga, and Dante all began to burst out in boils where blood had made contact with them. In Simon and Olga’s cases, having drunk the blood of the hell hounds, the blood boiled inside of them. An additional threat posed itself as they could hear growling down the hallway, more hell hounds approaching.

Summoning what energy they could in their weakened states, everyone opened fire on Mary. She retreated further along the overhand of the roof and the group pursued. A second volley of gunfire sent her off the edge and to the concrete ground three stories below. Her control of the hell hounds broken, the hounds whimpered away.

Dirk descended to the ground level and pinned the helpless Mary Mallon against the wall of the building. He demanded to know why she had infected so many and she confessed that it was the destiny of her blood, and threatened that it would become the destiny of his. Having heard enough, he decapitated her, and the group, exhausted, made their way back to their boat to return to Manhattan.